Arts & Culture | Film

Contemplating the eighth edition of the Other Israel Film Festival, which opens Nov. 6, it occurs to me that the event, which underwent a subtle shift in focus a few years ago, has become a richer, more interesting program as a result. While the festival originally sought to showcase films by or about the segments of the Israeli population that were neither Jews nor Palestinians (and hence shunted to the margins of our perception of the country), it now presents the reality of “otherness” in Israeli society.

For the second time this year, a musical takes as its inspiration the biblical “Song of Songs.” “Shulamit,” a Hebrew-language drama (with English supertitles), is the brainchild of Dina Pruzhansky. (It follows Andrew Beall and Neil Van Leeuwen’s “Song of Solomon” this summer.) Pruzhansky is a COJECO BluePrint Fellow (the program facilitates projects from young Jewish adults of Russian origin). Radio broadcaster Robert Sherman hosts the opening night event.

A veteran film editor and director-producer of several documentaries, all of which center on the African-American experience, Adam Zucker won a travel grant to Poland in 2008. He had not been there before, and had only distant family ties to the country.

Seventy years ago this week, four women prisoners took part in an act of heroic resistance at Auschwitz, for which they were later hanged. Ala Gertner, Roza Robota, Regina Szafirsztajn, and Estera Wajcblum, all Polish Jews, were instrumental in smuggling gunpowder from a munitions factory to leaders of the underground in Birkenau, the adjacent camp. Their co-conspirators managed to blow up a crematorium, damaging it beyond repair so it was never used again.

It is the evening of Aug. 24, 1944, and Allied troops are headed for Occupied Paris. The Wehrmacht, commanded by Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, are IS preparing to dynamite all the bridges in the city except the Pont Neuf, and all the landmarks. All that remains is for the order to be given.